Shion no Ou: The Flowers of Hard Blood.

Is it interesting? If you asked me this question when I was on the initial chapters of this manga, I would have had given a completely different answer than what I am about to give now. Starting the manga, for me, it was extremely boring, maybe even tedious to get through the chapters sometimes. Now? I have essentially read the whole manga in a day. Once I locked in, the manga just didn't let me stop reading more of its chapters. I just was reading chapters after chapters without any brakes, which only stopped after I finished it. I hate Shogi. Actually not hate it, it ismore like I don't understand it well. I once tried to learn some of its terminologies and its workings, but it was all so boring that I gave it up halfway. And the Shogi in this manga isn't any different. It is the same boring game. For my mind, it is just people randomly putting on some pieces on the board in a certain pattern. But what this manga does to camouflage that boredom induced from Shogi, is to add a hue of crime thriller in it. And it works extremely well. The murder mystery is written well to a fault. I never would have believed that Murder x Shogi would sync that well. For me this manga was a murder mystery first and a shogi manga second. As I have repeatedly told that I don't know jack shit about shogi, so during all the matches all I was able to get that one person won over the other. I was just nodding my head off in rhythm on the things the manga told me about the match. How an opponent won?, What tactics did he used?, How grand and difficult the matches actually were?, I didn't understand anything. So all the weight behind those matches were derived from the drama of the plot. And I don't feel like I have missed out on anything. The characters were very interesting and well written. No one was there just for the sake of plot, everyone had their purpose and everyone served their purpose. Great character development also went hand in hand. I think the thing that made this crime thriller even more interesting than it already was were its characters. The art has certainly improved as we progressed. You can certainly see the difference between the first chapter and last one. One thing about the artstyle which I wanted to talk about, is that I weirdly waited for any chibi drawings to see, and I would become happy like a damn kid when I saw them, like he has been given his lollipop to hold onto. So I don't have any qualms regarding the art or the artstyle. For me it was a damn good manga.